Autodesk taking as builts seriously : Photo Modeling and PointClouds in next release?

With all the stuff flying out of Autodesk Labs recently one maybe blinded by the technology slant rather than the strategy. Looking specifically at Photofly and their new PointCloud tools with shape extraction Autodesk is putting together a strong effort in capturing the built environment within their CAD platform. Looking at the ribbon from an AutoCAD beta you can see that Photo Modeling and PointCloud are options available directly within the menu.

You can see these option on the far right, somewhat obscured by one of my feeds. Yes, my blog formatting skills still need fine tuning. Last time we researched this over 80% of construction in Boston was done within existing buildings. This new technology push with our own research dove tails nicely with the sustainable retrofit anecdotes.

I think it becomes more important that applications work within familiar platforms to not not only increase their adoption but also to incorporate into an existing workflow. Asking anyone to learn a new platform is always a tougher hill to climb and most shops are standardizing their drafting/modeling on to one or two applications.

From a technology stand point, the more tools the more better because this has been a soft spot in the whole CAD/BIM world, that is I am working in an existing building, I use Revit, I used AutoCAD, okay, now where do I start. Defining this will help everyone.